If the screen dispalyed the error message on my computer "Non-system
disk or disk error", and there's a virus that's attacked the hard
drive or the hard drive crashed on my computer, and the hard drive had
been backed up, what might be a strategy for soving this problem?

---

Clarification of Question by infogamer-ga on 24 Feb 2005 11:18 PST

This question came from a homework assignment for troubleshooting and
configuration. It's a hypothetical situation, and luckily not a real
one. If a certain user got the error message "No-system disk or disk
error" when they turned on their computer, and was concerned that they
had been hit by a virus attack or that they had had a hard disk crash
and lost all their valuable data and it had been several weeks since
they had backed up their hard drive, what should they do to
troubleshoot this problem?

Take out the disk. Reboot. Go to trendmicro.com. Free scan.

Reboot your computer, and wait for the error.  When it displays, check
your floppy drive on the tower, and if there is a floppy disk in
there, remove it.

Next, press the space bar on your keyboard.

Tell me if this worked.

~~Cynthia

most likely the virus you have corrupted your operating system.  If it
is 2000 or xp, put your windows cd in and boot to the setup and select
recovery console, at the prompt type "chkdsk /r". if that doesnt work,
boot back to the windows setup and select repair current installation,
this will rewrite all the system files, but will leave the data you
had, as long as it is still there, intact... you may need to reinstall
a couple programs though after this route.

if it is 95/98/me.. you can run setup and install the operating system
over top of itself, however I would just pull the hard drive and put
it in another machine to copy the data you need and just format the
disk and rebuild the operating system, however like i said you can try
and just install over top of the previous installation first.

let me know if you have any questions.

aaron

This question came from a homework assignment for troubleshooting and
configuration. It's a hypothetical situation, and luckily not a real
one. If a certain user got the error message "No-system disk or disk
error" when they turned on their computer, and was concerned that they
had been hit by a virus attack or that they had had a hard disk crash
and lost all their valuable data and it had been several weeks since
they had backed up their hard drive, what should they do to
troubleshoot this problem?

They should take out the floppy diskette and reboot, slapping the back
of their heads for worrying so much.


You're not supposed to post homework.